HONG KONG — The Chinese government is preparing to announce in the coming days that it will allow its currency to strengthen slightly and vary more from day to day, a move being taken for domestic policy reasons in China but likely to please the Obama administration, people with knowledge of the emerging consensus in Beijing said on Thursday.

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A more market-oriented currency policy in Beijing, with a trend toward a stronger renminbi, could help the American economy in several ways, according to economists. A stronger renminbi would make Chinese goods more expensive in the United States and make American goods cheaper in China, which is currently exporting more than four times as much to the United States as it imports.

The value of exports through the state, $10.3 billion, was an 18.5 percent increase over the previous January and the third month of year-over-year increases. It was nearly identical to the nationwide increase in exports.

.”Even so, we are now just getting back to the level of exporting we were at in early 2007, before the global financial and economic crisis sent international trade spiraling down,” O’Connell said..

O’Connell said he anticipated continued export increases “if only because the economies of most of our major trading partners continue to expand,” but added, “The most worrisome prospect involves the risk of fall-out from the financial turmoil now gripping the European Union and especially those countries in the euro zone.”

Imports through California also showed a sharp increase, up 14.6 over the previous January to $23 billion.

A popular notion is that when U.S. companies expand abroad, they reduce domestic activity. In other words, when U.S. companies outsource, the U.S. loses jobs. A study just published in the AEA: Economic Policy Journal by Desai, Foley, and Hines Jr. shows the opposite is true. This has significant policy and popular perception implications. From the abstract: